White House garden: Kids help Michelle Obama with harvest

Food goes to Miriam's Kitchen charity

WASHINGTON — -- First lady Michelle Obama got in the dirt Thursday when she joined elementary students in harvesting vegetables and herbs from her world-famous organic garden.

The White House Kitchen Garden, planted in March on the South Lawn, features about 75 varieties of plants. Almost as many cameras were on hand for the big dig.

Before its latest yield, the third, the garden had generated more than 740 pounds of edibles, including kohlrabi, turnips, radishes, cauliflower, eggplant, lettuce, spinach, broccoli, rapini, tomatoes, peppers and beans.

Obama unearthed sweet potatoes, carrots and fennel. She correctly predicted the yams would be "huge," saying she and her daughters already had dug some up. "Now this is a sweet potato," she said, judging a specimen. "This could feed an army."

At her urging, students guessed the year-round garden cost between $300 and $6,000, but she revealed it took less than $180 to prepare the soil and purchase seed.

The first lady bent and stretched, or squatted, as she worked, as if to avoid a gardener's badge of honor: dirty knees. A novice, she took frequent cues from Sam Kass, an assistant White House chef who had cooked for the family in Chicago, where he was with Avec restaurant. He was one of six Executive Mansion chefs who turned out.

Normally the bounty is used in the White House or donated. The latest harvest is bound for Miriam's Kitchen, a charity for the homeless.

The garden is the first planted at the White House since Eleanor Roosevelt's World War II "victory garden." About the size of a small backyard, today's incarnation is understated except for the markers whose elegant script heralds such prosaic plants as "kale" and "collards."

About 30 schoolchildren showed up Thursday. Before it was over, the first lady gathered her pint-size guests for a photo in front of the South Portico, calling out: "All right, one, two, three. Vegetables!"